I wonder the same thing about folks who check for new email every 5 minutes, follow 5,000 people on Twitter, or try to do anything sane with 500 RSS feeds.

Some graze unlimited bowls of information by choice. Others claim it’s a necessity of remaining employed, landing sales, or “staying in the loop.” Could be. What about you?

How do you know when you’ve had “enough?”

Not everything, all the time, completely, forever. Just enough. Enough to start, finish, or simply maintain.

(via Enough by Merlin Mann on 43 Folders)

After I read this short essay by Merlin Mann, I got rid of a good handful of the news feeds I was reading in Google Reader. My life already feels better, and has continued to for the week or so since I did it. Turns out I didn’t need up-to-the-minute headlines on Tiger Woods’s love life and fifty funny headlines a day from Fark and The Onion. If I’m aching for a funny headline, I can always peek at the site sometime. But I don’t need it every day. I certainly don’t miss it yet.

I also did a big cleanup on Twitter recently that has made it a simple joy again. Something to fill in gaps for a quick bit of communication or an enjoyable tidbit of a friend’s day. It’s not something I feel like I have to check every five minutes any more just to keep up. Turns out I don’t need to keep up with every move every band and person I know at every moment.

Suggested goal: Sometime before the new year, go through the websites, email newsletters, Twitter accounts, news feeds, newspapers, magazines and social networks that take your attention and ask yourself whether or not each of them is essential to your daily survival. Try to get rid of a third or even just a quarter of it. Then open your eyes to all the things you have time for with those extra moments.

And so begins a series of sorts where I discuss the podcasts I like to listen to. Because I’m sure you all care a great deal what it is I’m giggling like a little kid about while I’m on the treadmill at the gym.

Merlin Mann is my hero. I stumbled across him a few years ago while he was in the blogger spotlight as the writer behind 43 Folders, a site for people who want to be more productive at their desk (in other words: nerds).

More recently he resurfaced as Twitter champ hotdogsladies, which is how I discovered his banter-filled podcast You Look Nice Today: a journal of emotional hygiene.

When I say banter, I mean banter. The show has no purpose but to entertain, and topics are nearly indeterminable. Mann talks (via Skype, I assume) with his friends Scott Simpson and Adam Lisagor, both of whom I know very little about.

These men are professional shit-shooters. They seem to pick up each others’ cues like professional improv comedians, always accepting their peers’ realities and adding to them.

I am willing to admit that this last episode had me giggling like a mad man in my car driving around town the other day. They talk about such random things (such as their awkward, nerdy attempts at fitting in/being cool growing up), and yet still make it easy to identify with. And they talk a mile a minute, so you barely have a moment to figure out what’s going on before they’re on to the next thing. You just have to accept the absurd and enjoy it for what it is. And it is enjoyable.

If you’re looking for some (PG-13 to R-rated) comedy to fill a half hour of your week (or month, as the case has been lately), You Look Nice Today will hit the spot. I always look forward to the next episode and get excited when I have a spare 30 minutes to savor every moment.

And that is why You Look Nice Today is a Podcast I Like.

I wonder what would happen if it weren’t considered bragging to tell people about our generosity. Do you think people would see what others are doing and feel the need to “keep up” by being more generous? Would that be generosity in the wrong mindset?

A while back I did this Twitter For Food thing and announced on Twitter that I’d skip lunch and donate $10 to hunger relief instead. I got some semi-negative responses about showing off, but I wasn’t doing it to be proud. I wanted to show other people how easy it is to help.

Today is World Aids Day and, of course, it trended on Twitter with all sorts of people “raising awareness.” But I wonder how often anyone actually acts on that awareness. Then along came Merlin Mann in all his wonder:

Roiling emo outrage over the Human Condition gets way more credible if you quit fucking around on the internet and go DO something.

So, here I am, wondering what to do. Because I do donate money to a fair number of causes and have volunteered countless hours of my time over the years. But I don’t tell people how much I give or to who, really, because that’s common courtesy. And I wonder what would happen if I threw that common courtesy out the window, and others did too, so that we’re using social networks to tell people what we’re actively doing to help instead of just “raising awareness.”

I stole this video from Merlin Mann, a recently-discovered hero.

John Cleese hits a lot of nails on their heads here. I love the idea of “tortoise enclosures.” When I’m being creative — while making websites, writing code, writing blog posts and magazine articles, whatever — my best tortoise enclosures are coffee houses and my headphones that I keep at the office that I use to ignore my boss. He hates those headphones and I love them for the same reason: I can ignore everything around me (namely, him) and get things done. He’ll probably read this blog post and scowl at me because both of us know that I’m good at what I do. I’m not being cocky, I swear.

On that note, I also like Cleese’s point about blind spots: how people who are bad at something often don’t know they are bad at it because they lack the intuition at that thing to tell good from bad. This is why we see really bad American Idol contestants and leaders who suck at leading, and talented workers who know better than to climb corporate ladders if they’re good at the job they’re already doing.